The Opt-Out Revolution

Published: October 26, 2003

(Page 9 of 9)

And what she has concluded, after all this thinking, is that the exodus of professional women from the workplace isn't really about motherhood at all. It is really about work. ''There's a misconception that it's mostly a pull toward motherhood and her precious baby that drives a woman to quit her job, or apparently, her entire career,'' she says. ''Not that the precious baby doesn't magnetize many of us. Mine certainly did. As often as not, though, a woman would have loved to maintain some version of a career, but that job wasn't cutting it anymore. Among women I know, quitting is driven as much from the job-dissatisfaction side as from the pull-to-motherhood side.''

She compares all this to a romance gone sour. ''Timing one's quitting to coincide with a baby is like timing a breakup to coincide with graduation,'' she says. ''It's just a whole lot easier than breaking up in the middle of senior year.''

That is the gift biology gives women, she says. It provides pauses, in the form of pregnancy and childbirth, that men do not have. And as the workplace becomes more stressful and all-consuming, the exit door is more attractive. ''Women get to look around every few years and say, 'Is this still what I want to be doing?''' she says. ''Maybe they have higher standards for job satisfaction because there is always the option of being their child's primary caregiver. When a man gets that dissatisfied with his job, he has to stick it out.''

This, I would argue, is why the workplace needs women. Not just because they are 50 percent of the talent pool, but for the very fact that they are more willing to leave than men. That, in turn, makes employers work harder to keep them. It is why the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche has more than doubled the number of employees on flexible work schedules over the past decade and more than quintupled the number of female partners and directors (to 567, from 97) in the same period. It is why I.B.M. employees can request up to 156 weeks of job-protected family time off. It is why Hamot Medical Center in Erie, Pa., hired a husband and wife to fill one neonatology job, with a shared salary and shared health insurance, then let them decide who stays home and who comes to the hospital on any given day. It is why, everywhere you look, workers are doing their work in untraditional ways.

Women started this conversation about life and work -- a conversation that is slowly coming to include men. Sanity, balance and a new definition of success, it seems, just might be contagious. And instead of women being forced to act like men, men are being freed to act like women. Because women are willing to leave, men are more willing to leave, too -- the number of married men who are full-time caregivers to their children has increased 18 percent. Because women are willing to leave, 46 percent of the employees taking parental leave at Ernst & Young last year were men.

Looked at that way, this is not the failure of a revolution, but the start of a new one. It is about a door opened but a crack by women that could usher in a new environment for us all.

Why don't women run the world?

''In a way,'' Amsbary says, ''we really do.''

Photos: Ratcheting back in San Francisco. From left, foreground, Lisa Tafuri Krim and her son, Dylan, and Tracey Van Hooser and her son, Jack; in background, Courtney Klinge.; Vicky Benedict (Princeton, Duke law), seen here with her Atlanta book group, now stays home to rear her kids. ''This is what I was meant to do at this time,'' she says. Sally Sears left her TV job to spend more time with her son, Will. But, she says, ''As long as I have the chit on the table that says 'This is not forever,' then I feel O.K.'' (Photographs by Andrea Stern)